Picking up immediately after the events of John Wick 2, John
Wick is now classified as “ex communicado” by the shadowy syndicate of
assassins known as “The Table”, which means that every other assassin on the
planet is out to get him and he is entirely cut off from all the resources that
the Table offers their assassins. Cashing in on every favour owed him, Wick has
no choice but to either re-enter the syndicates good books or vanish so
completely off the face of the Earth that no one will ever bother him again.

WHAT WE THOUGHT:

After being pretty lukewarm about both of the previous John
Wick films, the third instalment hasn’t exactly changed my mind about the
series but I can quite confidentially declare John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
to be by far the best John Wick flick to date. If you haven’t liked the other
John Wick movies then you won’t like this one very much either but if you
thought the first two films were good or better, prepare yourself for a treat.
Of all the John Wick movies so far this is by far the John Wickiest.

The stuff that makes John Wick work for so many people isn’t
just on evidence here but, in large part, has actually been improved upon by
returning director, Chad Stahelski, and a writing team once again led by Derek
Kolstad. With so much of the same talent behind and in front of the camera,
it’s not exactly surprising that the latest John Wick is more of the same but
it is somewhat surprising that it is better of the same too.

There are, for a start, some of the most spectacular action
scenes in the franchise to date. At their very best, they remind me of Jackie
Chan at his most inventive, athletic and, yes, comedic. And I could offer
almost no greater compliment. Unlike most of Jackie’s movies, however,
Parabellum is almost absurdly violent and ups the gore and brutality from the
previous films but, by this point, it’s done with so much almost balletic grace
and pitch-black humour that it has about as much to do with real-life violence
as movie musicals have to do with suddenly bursting out singing in the middle
of a crowded train station.

On the flip side, however much I largely enjoyed the action
scenes centred around non-firearm-based combat for their variety, invention,
physical comedy and all around brilliant choreography, the gun fights were a
total snooze – no matter how loud they were. To vastly paraphrase Obi Wan
Kenobi in the original Star Wars movie, guns simply don’t have the elegance of
of swords... or, for that matter, knives, fists, feet, horses, dogs and whatever
else John Wick uses to dispatch his many, many enemies. Sure, the gunfights are
still the most elaborate since the “Gun-Fu” of Equilibrium but they still get
very monotonous, very quickly.

And monotony is still the biggest problem I have with these
films and it is only slightly improved upon here. That endless gunfights get
brain-numbingly boring after a while is no real surprise but everything here
suffers from excess. Keanu is still a lot of fun as the title character (and is
even better in interviews talking about - full name only please – John Wick) but
just a bit more actual, you know, characterisation would go a very long way.
There is much more plot here too with the whole mythology of the Table (so
called just to make “over” and “under” puns) finally coming into focus but,
honestly, it’s not really worth the build up.

Another issue is that though the male supporting characters/
allies/ enemies are once again tremendous fun with Ian McShane and Laurence
Fishburn, in particular, once again stealing the show and Mark Dacascos
deliciously entertaining as the series’ most memorable main villain, the
addition of three new female supporting characters goes rather less well. I
appreciate the attempt to add a feminine perspective to the proceedings but, in
this case, solidly good intentions don’t really translate to actual success.

Halle Berry brings a few attack dogs to further diversify
the action scenes but she herself fails to spark any interest as her post-Oscar
career continues to land with one thuddingly unengaging performance after
another. Asia Kate Dillon, meanwhile, has a bit more fun here but her uber-cool
“Adjudicator” gets tiresome after really not too long. Anjelica Huston as a
Russian mob boss probably acquits herself the best here but for someone who
made such a memorable mark as, among many other great roles, the matriarch of
both the Adams and Tenenbaum families, John Wick will be but a blip on her
extraordinary filmography.

At this point, it’s really quite pointless to recommend this
film because, unless you missed the other films (which is hardly impossible, I
suppose, but why the hell would you start here?), you pretty much know whether
you’ll like it or not. From my point of view, though, this is easily the John
Wick film with which I had the most amount of fun – I just think it would be
massively improved by giving John Wick a Batman-like aversion to guns while
stripping the bloated runtime of 130 minutes down to a solid and
b-movie-appropriate eighty or ninety minutes. Inevitably, John Wick 4 is set up
in the final moments and, who knows, maybe that will finally be the John Wick
movie to correct the series’ frankly fairly fixable issues but, failing that, I
don’t know quite how long they can draw this out before even fans start losing
patience.

That’s the future, though. For now, fans have been rewarded
for their patronage with by far the best (and wackiest/ funniest) John Wick
film to date.